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Dependencies and Compatibility

As you may have noticed, two of Lilina’s major dependencies, SimplePie and HTML Purifier are becoming PHP5 only, with HTML Purifier’s latest releases being available for PHP4 only. I’ve posted previously on SimplePie’s availability for PHP5 only and how we could not switch to it. I later went back and completely backtracked, adding SimplePie to Lilina. It has now been used in Lilina for quite a while, mostly for the better. An old branch of HTML Purifier, 2.*, is used in Lilina and its new 3.* branch has a wealth of new features. Lilina is unable to utilise these at the moment for PHP4 compatibility. This disadvantages our PHP5 users, who could be getting faster and better parsing from HTML Purifier.

PHP5 has been around for more than 3 years and it is time to move on and embrace new developments and standards. PHP4 support and critical security updates have been dropped completely, as of 08/08/08 and all hosts are encouraged to upgrade to PHP5.

Going PHP5

As of today, PHP4 compatibility is being dropped from Lilina. We join a whole group of projects who have dropped support for PHP4.

What does this mean for me?

If your host is currently running PHP 5.2, nothing changes for you. If your host is currently running PHP4, 5.0.* or 5.1.*, convince your host to upgrade to PHP 5.2 or change hosts. Lilina will not be supporting PHP4 for future releases. For more information, check out this FAQ, published by GoPHP5.

What does this mean for Lilina?

This decision will enable faster development of Lilina, with many features being easier to achieve and faster. It also enables cleaner code, which can reduce the size of the codebase substantially.

This announcement will have benefits for everyone and I hope that it will have no ill effects on any users.